Saturday, May 27, 2017

Sleight of hand, Slate?

Over the past few days, my social media feed has been buzzing about Slate’s “The Big Shortcut.” The eight-part series, developed in coordination with Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s The Teacher Project,
explores “the exponential rise in online learning for high school
students who have failed traditional classes.” Many of us have been
working hard to sound the alarm about online education undermining
teaching as an inherently human, relationship-driven endeavor and to
draw attention to negative impacts of digital curriculum on student
health and emotional well being. So to have our concerns seemingly
validated by not just one article but by EIGHT was initially refreshing;
that is until I read the whole series. Once I finished the last
article, I was left scratching my head.

Why would Slate and The Teacher Project expend significant
resources to discuss one VERY narrow aspect of online education, namely
credit recovery? Certainly it’s an egregious practice, but given the
rise of personalized “blended/hybrid” online learning that is overtaking
regular classrooms, why choose to expend ALL their energy exhausting
that topic while remaining silent on so many others? There are millions
of students today enrolled in regular bricks and mortar neighborhood
schools who are taking one or more online classes as a regular part of
their curriculum. In fact, some states actually require students to take
an online course in order to graduate. These are not credit-recovery
courses. Austerity budgeting, teacher shortages and ever-more rigorous
graduation requirements are increasingly pressuring districts to
delegate core instruction to the cyber-sphere. Everyone is expected to
do more with less—less money, less time, fewer human bodies; and with
this disaster by design, digital curriculum becomes a convenient, but
ultimately dangerous, remedy. Readers should take note that in this
8-part series, discussion of non-credit recovery cyber instruction,
blended-hybrid-personalized learning and flipped classrooms is
conspicuously absent.

As Slate focuses our attention on credit-recovery, you might ask what
are they trying to distract us from or prepare us for? Well, you should
first know that the magazine started out as a Microsoft-sponsored venture in 1996.
The original staff operated out of the company’s Redmond, WA campus. It
was sold to the Washington Post Corporation in 2004. Also, Columbia
University, home of The Teacher Project, has a rather checkered past with respect to predatory home-correspondence/distance education detailed in David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills (see page 34). Following the money is my preferred strategy and in this case did not disappoint.